#disability liberation

[wormonastringtheory]

Hi friends, please help this family out. He's under constant sensory overload.

[this-world-of-beautiful-monsters]

I know the Disability Day of Mourning traditionally commemorates disabled people murdered by their parents and/or caregivers, but I wanted to take a moment to also commemorate the disabled lives lost during the genocides taking place in Palestine, the DRC, Sudan, and across the globe (including in the US). There are many ways for a system to perpetuate ableist violence and we must struggle as a community against all of them.

May the disabled souls taken from us rest in peace, every single one, and may the members of the disabled community currently fighting for their lives and the lives of their loved ones receive the support and safety they deserve.

If you have a bit to spare, please consider donating to Crips for eSims for Gaza and supporting their vital work.

[oliveasaltylife]

So funny* to me when very loud disability “activist” type folx will angrily post about needing necessary accessibility accommodations and then turn around posting maskless selfies in public. Your lateral ableism is showing and it’s louder than you intended it to be.

*By funny I mean completely infuriating, but laughing helps me cope

[faithfromanewperspective]

I feel like a lot of discussion in worlds of how we do socialism and also people trying to (with varying levels of genuineness) do philanthropic or ethical versions of capitalism we talk about ‘the working class’ as if either they’re some people to empower or a human rights problem to fix. and yes there’s a struggle of power and for ownership of profit and yes we need to do that fairly and ethically but I think what people miss either deliberately or from trained and systemic invisibility of marginalised groups is that the working class have never been the lowest class. in fact the average person you could say is and has always been working class (don’t let the middle in middle class fool you). there are an entire diverse caste of people who have fallen out of the bottom of society due to inability to work or fit into a nice role in the system and when some of us don’t fit, none of the systems people think of to ‘help’ are going to work when they’re within the same narrative. disabled people can’t work the same as a abled people, so what is a fair share of the profits? neither can addicts, at least not without help. and this group of people often do actually require more capital to have their needs met in ways your average working class person doesn’t. like I don’t want to invalidate your working class plight but. do we not remember centuries of shame when something befalls a relative causing them to fall into that category, be it at birth or later? do we not remember the people we locked up away from society? to those of us who have always existed and exist now, I love you. you deserve to have your voices heard and your needs met and your value not tied to your productivity. you deserve to be centred and not sidelined in these discussions and you deserve a new conceptualisation of how we create an equitable society. and while I don’t see that in mainstream yet I want to normalise as able, working to meet our own needs and then some for those we love who we can feed into the ecosystem and invest in. I want to normalise celebrating the work of existing and being present and staying alive and caring for yourself more than working to feed the economy. that’s work we can all do. and I want to be careful in saying this, but I want to normalise the idea that there is no leisure until we can all have liberation and sustenance. there is rest and reminding ourselves we’ve done enough and we are enough. but there’s no sitting back in comfort, which many of us raised in middle class lifestyles might be used to. not while part of society is still invisible.

[justalittlesolarpunk]

Hello Earth! Looking to make connections with likeminded people and share good news and positive ideas. Not sure what this blog will evolve into (probably nothing as I have a busy life) but I’d love to follow you if you’re posting about similar stuff!

[bunnygrl-femme]

listen i'm also in the camp of anti surveillance spy devices but you gotta think about what you're actually telling people when you say shit like that about smart home devices. i'm disabled and mostly bedbound and i can control my own lights for the first time in years and i can control my tv without struggling to move my fingers around a remote control because of my smart home setup. i have to give up my own privacy to do it and i'm not happy about it but you have to think of them as accessibility devices too. predatory accessibility devices i'll give you that, they absolutely pray disproportionately on profoundly disabled people like me who rely on them for day to day life and harvest data from vulnerable folks who can't live without them and i'd really rather google wasn't listening to everything i said. but there's a good number of people in the world who don't get much choice at all and they're not even that much of a minority or exception. maybe instead of taking your anger out on people who use these devices you could use the same energy to target companies, not for creating smart devices, but for using disabled people's accessibility devices for unethical data harvesting and spying. i can promise you that telling people they're Bad and making Bad Choices for using these things isnt going to do much other than make people feel like a bag of shit for relying on them.

I'm gonna be honest with you anon, on two things. 1:) I don't know which post you're talking about. These are absolutely things I've said, and things I think, but I don't recall the post. And 2:) you are absolutely right. I never considered smart home devices in terms of accessibility. This is my abled privilege, that I never had to see the world with this lens before. And you're right on another count; capitalists absolutely pray on disabled people's need for accessibility to buy and sell their privacy. And we should put the pressure and the blame squarely at the foot of the capitalists who target disabled folks.

I'm taking an L on this one, y'all. And I'm shifting my politics to be more intersectional with disability liberation. Thanks for educating me, anon.

[joy-haver]

So this is in reply to a post where a bunch of popular disability blogs were essentially yelling eugenicist ideas at each other. I’m replying here because I don’t think I’d be met with good faith on the original post, and because this stands on its own I think.

Anyways

If we want to have anything approaching a radical and helpful disability movement, we have to talk about eugenics. We have to talk about white supremacy.

We have to build theoretical frameworks, learn our history, and most importantly, learn the theories and history of those we are trying to fight. Otherwise we are lashing out at an enemy while having no idea how to effectively fight them. (1)

Capitalism is bad. But, capitalism isn’t the Big Bad. It’s not the Final Evil that you can kill and erase all other systems of oppression. In fact, if you don’t unlearn the root ideologies of capitalism, your anti capitalist actions may be just as harmful or worse than the current system.

As best I can tell, the root ideologies of capitalism are Eugenics and White Supremacy.

And one thing to understand is that on the Venn diagram of Eugenics and White Supremacy, it’s basically a circle. All eugenicists are building towards white supremacy (whether they want to or not). And all white supremacists are doing eugenics (whether they understand it or not).

Broadly speaking, eugenics is the process of biological power accumulation. White supremacy is the process of social power accumulation.

The goal of both is to ‘breed a better race of perfect whites,’ and ‘to breed races of servants that are suited to providing for the master race. ‘ this is not conspiracy. This was the stated goal of the entire American political system from fairly early on. [edit, and the stated goal of feudalism to some extent but that’s complicated, and the British empire, I digress, but this isnt a recent invention]

This is the root of the Progressive movement (it was all about progressing the race, in this case always meaning the white race).

This is the roots of the Klan. And the cops. And of landlords, and the education system, and scientific institutions, and most of modern Christianity, and the medical system is there to finish you off. They are all founded on the ideals of eugenics and white supremacy.(2)

And something you have to understand is that in the mind of these power seeking white supremacist eugenicists, being a person of color *is a disability*. White people can be disabled too, but categorically, they view all non white people as disabled, inferior, and somewhere between human (which to them means master race) and animal (which to them essentially means tool that works on its own).

White supremacy is trying to domesticate us. All of us. They are tying to figure how to ‘utilize’ the ‘animals’ at their disposal.

•If youre intelligent, your basically a better version of a computer to them, and that’s it.

•If your strong, they see you as a draft animal.

•A good companion and friend? They see you as a pet.

Capitalism is the name we give to the breeding project. That’s it. That’s what alll this is. All the systems are literally designed to kill those that they don’t want breading, or to stop them from having kids. All these systems are to encourage the “top quality” white women to breed. All these systems are to create a white future with a small, controlled, and self managing system of servants.

If you want to fight for disability rights *this!!!* is what you have to fight against. And you have to start by fighting against it within your own mind.

Disclaimer: Please feel free to critique me. I’m a white girl talking about white supremacy, I know for a fact I’m missing nuance. But treat this as a starting point to build better ideas. Tear me down brick by brick if you have to, but use those bricks to develope a systemic analysis if that is at all possible for you. If it’s not, then do what you can.

Footnotes

1. When I say “we” need to learn this stuff, I mean the disability movement as a whole needs to hold this knowledge. It’s impossible for anyone person to know everything relevant. But learn what you can and share it frequently and with a desire to teach. Accept knowledge and critique, and critique all knowledge you accept.

2. If you want to know the history, stick around. I’ll keep explaining things as long as I possibly can. I promise. But the fastest way to learn it yourself is to look up the views that different historical movements had on eugenics, white supremacy, and power accumulation. and then try to connect that to the actions they took. Follow the trails of how their ideologies informed their work, and how their work led to the hellscape we are currently in.

[aronarchy]

Sysmeds seem to be completely unable to be critical of the DSM or anything else they read if it’s “official,” lol.

The fight to exclude non-distressed impairment from definitions of disorder is a hard-fought ongoing battle by disability activists.

Currently, what is considered “functioning wrong” is determined entirely by (white Western) standards of what is “bad functioning”: when something goes against a set notion of what the body should be like/do. Once again sysmeds (like certain other bigoted/exclusionist/identity-invalidating/-disbelieving groups) essentialize the “default” human body (or what they consider the default) at the expense of individual needs and desires and experiences. If the body/mind is working “wrongly,” but the individual is okay with it and not distressed by it, where’s the issue? Why is it an illness, why does it need to be “fixed”?

Consider that not everyone aligns with the expected default regarding what they want and feel in comparison to what their body/mind is doing. And that is okay.

Major strawman/edge case there: anti-sysmedicalists have never said that the distress we discuss is “distress from knowing you have DID (they’re probably thinking of people feeling despair/internalized stigma).” We acknowledge that you can be in distress from experiencing DID while unaware/in denial of it. Not what this is about. If you “have parts” but are not in distress, it is not DID.

If someone “experiences issues” with relationships/work, that means they are distressed by it. But distress has to be evaluated in isolation: is their distress caused by having alters itself, or the alters fighting/switching a lot but not having alters itself (as in, if the fighting & frequent switching were addressed there would no longer be any distress), or is it because they are forced to do relationships/work because of society/capitalism forcing them into distressing situations they would not experience if they had choice in a liberated world?

Unless they aren’t distressed, but still do relationships/work in a way normative society considers “wrong”/rulebreaking/inefficient/whatever, and go through that totally aware and fine with it, and although they are incapable of forcing themselves to conform they are totally fine with not conforming. In which, once again, the problem would be with external society alone, not the way their brain works itself.

Perhaps think for a damn second before you start saying “disorder is when you can’t be a good little capitalist stooge on the assembly line being as productive as your peers even if you don’t have a problem with that as long as your bosses do.” Perhaps consider where that rhetoric likely came from, and who would benefit from it.

(Note: I’m not saying situations 1 or 2 would not qualify as DID/disordered. But clarifications.)

Seems like sysmeds on average/mostly consider autism inherently a disorder. But why would my autism be a disorder, if in an accommodating and non-stigmatizing world I would not experience any distress from the fact that I have it, and all the distress I experience right now is allowed to be because of/caused by external factors? (Obviously every autistic person has different experiences. But also, obviously, nuance exists.)

I do have actual disorders and the experience is quite different, they’re mostly hell with a few occasional reprieves (though I’m kind of recovering and have been doing better these past few months) but yeah, I’m extremely pissed off at medicalists trying to equate the two experiences. I (personally) would greatly appreciate if I had the option to make them/their symptoms go away entirely, as they’re quite unpleasant. I think it's quite ridiculous that certain people would claim experiencing that is equivalent to merely experiencing abnormality/non-normativity/divergence/difference.

Going to (shamelessly) self-promote my essay here, I scribbled it down at 2am two months ago and have been too low on spoons to edit out any potentially undesirable bits but I’m too tired of explaining the same things over and over and it’s reasonably comprehensive.

This post is not about origins, it is about currently experienced effects. Do not complain about this post being pro-/anti-endo, I’m pro-endo but that’s not really relevant to this.

[rebelwheelsnyczine]

TOPICS IN THIS ISSUE: Disability, Activism, Liberation, Self Care & Pride

Kindly use this #ACallForHealingAndRebellion to discuss the zine ACCESSIBILITY NOTE: According to Google Docs, the issue is accessible for those who use screen readers, however this zine issue is also available as a PDF. [image description: A horizontal rectangle. graphic. The background is half red tartan plaid fabric and the other half is gold glitter. The two textures are placed diagonally with the plaid fabric over the gold glitter a bit. On top, diagonal & in large yellow orange letters, in a font that is bold but looks aged, as if it was chipping a bit, it reads: issue #1]

[aughwl]

Disability liberation should never be about finding out the exact way to categorise who does and does not count as a specific kind of disabled and then witholding accomodation from everyone else.

Disability liberation means recognising the ways everyone has disabilities in some ways (to varying degrees and depending on circumstance, but always in some capacity) and making sure that accomodation is freely available for people to use as they know from experience is necessary for them.

[hyperlexichypatia]

As I keep shouting into the void, pathologizers love shifting discussion about material conditions into discussion about emotional states.

I rant approximately once a week about how the brain maturity myth transmuted “Young adults are too poor to move out of their parents’ homes or have children of their own” into “Young adults are too emotionally and neurologically immature to move out of their parents’ homes or have children of their own.”

I’ve also talked about the misuse of “enabling” and “trauma” and “dopamine” .

And this is a pattern – people coin terms and concepts to describe material problems, and pathologization culture shifts them to be about problems in the brain or psyche of the person experiencing them. Now we’re talking about neurochemicals, frontal lobes, and self-esteem instead of talking about wages, wealth distribution, and civil rights. Now we can say that poor, oppressed, and exploited people are suffering from a neurological/emotional defect that makes them not know what’s best for themselves, so they don’t need or deserve rights or money.

Here are some terms that have been so horribly misused by mental health culture that we’ve almost entirely forgotten that they were originally materialist critiques.

Codependency What it originally referred to: A non-addicted person being overly “helpful” to an addicted partner or relative, often out of financial desperation. For example: Making sure your alcoholic husband gets to work in the morning (even though he’s an adult who should be responsible for himself) because if he loses his job, you’ll lose your home. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/codependency-addiction-recovery.html What it’s been distorted into: Being “clingy,” being “too emotionally needy,” wanting things like affection and quality time from a partner. A way of pathologizing people, especially young women, for wanting things like love and commitment in a romantic relationship.

Compulsory Heterosexuality What it originally referred to: In the 1980 in essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/493756 Adrienne Rich described compulsory heterosexuality as a set of social conditions that coerce women into heterosexual relationships and prioritize those relationships over relationships between women (both romantic and platonic). She also defines “lesbian” much more broadly than current discourse does, encompassing a wide variety of romantic and platonic relationships between women. While she does suggest that women who identify as heterosexual might be doing so out of unquestioned social norms, this is not the primary point she’s making. What it’s been distorted into: The patronizing, biphobic idea that lesbians somehow falsely believe themselves to be attracted to men. Part of the overall “Women don’t really know what they want or what’s good for them” theme of contemporary discourse.

Emotional Labor What it originally referred to: The implicit or explicit requirement that workers (especially women workers, especially workers in female-dominated “pink collar” jobs, especially tipped workers) perform emotional intimacy with customers, coworkers, and bosses above and beyond the actual job being done. Having to smile, be “friendly,” flirt, give the impression of genuine caring, politely accept harassment, etc. https://weld.la.psu.edu/what-is-emotional-labor/ What it’s been distorted into: Everything under the sun. Everything from housework (which we already had a term for), to tolerating the existence of disabled people, to just caring about friends the way friends do. The original intent of the concept was “It’s unreasonable to expect your waitress to care about your problems, because she’s not really your friend,” not “It’s unreasonable to expect your actual friends to care about your problems unless you pay them, because that’s emotional labor,” and certainly not “Disabled people shouldn’t be allowed to be visibly disabled in public, because witnessing a disabled person is emotional labor.” Anything that causes a person emotional distress, even if that emotional distress is rooted in the distress-haver’s bigotry (Many nominally progressive people who would rightfully reject the bigoted logic of “Seeing gay or interracial couples upsets me, which is emotional labor, so they shouldn’t be allowed to exist in public” fully accept the bigoted logic of “Seeing disabled or poor people upsets me, which is emotional labor, so they shouldn’t be allowed to exist in public”).

Battered Wife Syndrome What it originally referred to: The all-encompassing trauma and fear of escalating violence experienced by people suffering ongoing domestic abuse, sometimes resulting in the abuse victim using necessary violence in self-defense. Because domestic abuse often escalates, often to murder, this fear is entirely rational and justified. This is the reasonable, justified belief that someone who beats you, stalks you, and threatens to kill you may actually kill you.

What it’s been distorted into: Like so many of these other items, the idea that women (in this case, women who are victims of domestic violence) don’t know what’s best for themselves. I debated including this one, because “syndrome” was a wrongful framing from the beginning – a justified and rational fear of escalating violence in a situation in which escalating violence is occurring is not a “syndrome.” But the original meaning at least partially acknowledged the material conditions of escalating violence.

I’m not saying the original meanings of these terms are ones I necessarily agree with – as a cognitive liberty absolutist, I’m unsurprisingly not that enamored of either second-wave feminism or 1970s addiction discourse. And as much as I dislike what “emotional labor” has become, I accept that “Women are unfairly expected to care about other people’s feelings more than men are” is a true statement.

What I am saying is that all of these terms originally, at least partly, took material conditions into account in their usage. Subsequent usage has entirely stripped the materialist critique and fully replaced it with emotional pathologization, specifically of women. Acknowledgement that women have their choices constrained by poverty, violence, and oppression has been replaced with the idea that women don’t know what’s best for themselves and need to be coercively “helped” for their own good. Acknowledgement that working-class women experience a gender-and-class-specific form of economic exploitation has been rebranded as yet another variation of “Disabled people are burdensome for wanting to exist.”

Over and over, materialist critiques are reframed as emotional or cognitive defects of marginalized people. The next time you hear a superficially sympathetic (but actually pathologizing) argument for “Marginalized people make bad choices because…” consider stopping and asking: “Wait, who are we to assume that this person’s choices are ‘bad’? And if they are, is there something about their material conditions that constrains their options or makes the ‘bad’ choice the best available option?”

[oliveasaltylife]

I really don’t need to see my physicians’ full “smiling” faces to know I’m going to be completely underwhelmed by their lack of care

[isabellascarlett1]

There’s nothing inherently “scary” about someone talking to themself in public.

There’s nothing “scary” about someone rocking back and forth in public.

There’s nothing “scary” about someone pacing back and forth in public.

Some of y’all are just ableist.

[softandorsweet]

being fat is hard because you don’t just run into inaccessibility that affects only you. for example, if i’m bigger than a car seat is built for, then i inconvenience those sitting next to me. if i’m bigger than a room is built for, i encroach on others space. it makes the fat person feel like it’s a personal fault, and skinny people are often not kind to fat folks who take up space. i want to make this clear: it is Not the fat persons fault AND i understand the strain and shame it can cause fat people. this world is built to exclude fat people. fitting of my favorite phrase inspired by the social model of disability; it’s not the fat persons fault, it’s the worlds fault.

[boyfailurr]

‘we support all people with disabilities’ are you normal about people being disabled because of being fat

[boughkeeper-dainsleif]

big shoutout to disabled people who smell bad. disabled people who cannot shower regularly. disabled people who sweat a lot and it causes them to smell bad. disabled people who cannot apply deodorant due to mobility restrictions. disabled people who cannot do laundry regularly or at all, and end up wearing dirty clothes for a long time. disabled people who cannot clean their living space, and thus end up smelling bad themselves. disabled people who have any condition or disability that causes body odor. and any other disabled people who smell bad for reasons i didn't mention. i see you and i love you.

(this post is for all disabled people, including mental and physical disabilities)